I got a bit delayed with putting these out this year, but I did enjoy myself this weekend, so that’s good. Workouts, friends, and rest are truly essential components of my days anymore. If you are a teacher, don’t underestimate their impact on your own health and well being. Our profession sometimes glamorizes the false benefits of being the “overworked martyr.” I certainly perpetuated this in the past. Trying to turn over a new leaf in recent years.

Thanks to Amy Crum for her solutions – I checked my own answers with hers before posting them.

Thoughts about the problems:

1: The Wolves problem. (Basics of linear regression and scatterplots) Haha! I LOVE the idea of simply asking what the heck “linear” and “strong” and “positive” mean in this context. I predict that many students will not respond substantively to these questions (You know- linear means it’s linear!)

2. Water and Soft Drinks. (one sample z-interval for a proportion) Cool context: there may be some issues with students correctly describing the population of interest and the sample of interest in correct context. A common error for my students is to mis-understand the context, and then say something totally incorrect at the end of the problem.

3. Melons. (normal models, conditional probability) Great probability problem. I like the subtle twist on conditional probability in part c).

4. Pottery. (making conclusions from boxplots, complex context) Another good, challenging problem with exploratory data analysis. Students will need to articulate which numbers from which parts of which box-plot(s) are providing evidence for their conclusions.

5. The Schizophrenia problem. Straight up simple chi-squared test. I wonder if students will be expected to describe the association after completing the test, or if completing the test is enough.

6. (Sampling with/ without replacement, tree diagram probability). This seemed like a shorter investigative task than in the past. I wonder what will suffice as “complete” reasoning/ work for each part. I especially wonder whether student swill be able to “transfer the lesson learned” from parts (a) and (b) to part (c) without additional work to confirm that this difference carries through to more complex situations.

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About roughlynormal

I have been a math/statistics teacher for 20 years. I currently teach at a college prep school in southern California. I also coach teaching fellows for Math for America - Los Angeles chapter. I love my career, my colleagues, and my friends & family.